French studio Bonsoir Paris play with ideas of form in stylish Substance shoot

We don’t start enough of our posts with quotes from great Russian writers so let’s rectify that on this chilly Tuesday with a line from Tolstoy: “In terms of sentiments, the lack of logic is the best evidence of sincerity.” The quotation serves as the starting point for an extraordinary project by French art direction/set design duo Bonsoir Paris. Their Substance shoot for Amusement magazine plays with the properties of a strange material which seems to flit between various states of solidity, with the models on, in and against this strange white form. Rémy Clémente and Morgan Maccari named their studio Bonsoir Paris because most of their creative work took place in the evenings after work, but with projects like this it’s no surprise that their burgeoning reputation has made the agency a full-time concern. Bravo chaps, bravo indeed!

Sitting at Simon Costin’s kitchen table, I am intensely aware that I’m not alone. Opposite me, the head and shoulders of a male mannequin gaze blankly out, flanked by butterflies arranged in ornate compositions inside enormous glass domes. Beside them, animated-looking puppets slump drunkenly against one another on the shelves, and upstairs a giant Humpty Dumpty egg is perched opulently on a chaise longue. It’s a macabre yet joyful collection of curiosities I’m keeping company with. But I should have expected nothing less from the relics of more than 20 years realising the grand fantasies of fashion’s most visionary minds.

The set designer that launched a thousand imitators, Rachel Thomas, has recently art directed, styled and designed the set for a hosiery shoot for Bare Journal. The magazine is a self-professed “ode to the raw beauty of realism and simplicity,” which perhaps explains why Rachel was roped in for the job: she’s the master of small details that fizzle together to form simple and engaging images. For this shoot, which she worked on with photographer Sandra Freij, Rachel’s task was to show off some of the best tights and stockings on the shelves at the moment, something that doesn’t sound that appealing. What she did with a bag of tights is far beyond the skill of anyone else, and she should be highly commended for taking something so mundane and making it genuinely covetable and exciting.

Fabulous photography, super set design and stunning scents. We’re starting to sound like a husky, sensual M&S advert. So before we delve into any more sensuous nonsense, we present a beautiful combination of all three of the aforementioned beauties: this gorgeous campaign for Laboratory Perfumes, entitled Imagining the Invisible. The images accompany the launch of the brand’s series The Lab, a range of “creative experiments in scent,” which look to the visual world to articulate how bloody lovely their perfumes are. These are shown on The Lab website, in images created by set design duo Lightning + Kinglyface (Anna Fulmine and Victoria Shahrokh, to the taxman), and photographed by Kate Jackling.

All too often these days we stumble across a jaw-dropping example of set design, only to discover the impressive final image is actually the result of some clever visual trickery and digital manipulation. That’s an impressive art unto itself, don’t get me wrong, but pure CGI can leave me feeling a little shortchanged.

When set designer Nicola Yeoman emailed us to say her newly simplified website was live, I went to check the last time we’d featured her on the site. Astonishingly I found that aside from mentions in a feature by Dan Tobin Smith (with whom she collaborated on the Jay Z album The Blueprint 3) we had apparently never dedicated a post to her extraordinary talents in their own right. So consider this long overdue.